It’s interesting to note that on the morning he shot Oswald, Ruby admitted to making an illegal left turn on Main Street after he saw a bunch of people gathered around City Hall.289 If only an officer had been there to give him a ticket on the spot that day.
The one area in Jack Ruby’s life that has received by far the most scrutiny is his alleged ties to the underworld, since conspiracy theorists and millions of everyday Americans believe that Ruby “silenced” Oswald for organized crime. Given his continual search to make a quick buck, and particularly in view of the fact that he operated a striptease club, it should not surprise anyone that Jack came into contact with and made the acquaintance of some shady characters and people of questionable reputations. Joe Bonds (Joseph Locurto), for instance, who had been one of his partners in the Vegas Club, was convicted of sodomy in 1954 and sentenced to eight years.290
But recalling Hyman Rubenstein’s remarks about him and his brother growing up in their Chicago neighborhood, what was Ruby to do when these unsavory characters walked into a Chicago diner he was in, or into his club in Dallas—ignore them? As brother Earl said, Jack “had a plush [hardly] striptease club and the Mafia used to go to his place when they were in town. They were big spenders and I’m sure he wasn’t unhappy when they came to his joint to spend their money.”291
Ruby associated with everyone. One of those people was Joseph Campisi, who with his brother Sam owned the Egyptian Lounge, a restaurant and bar that was one of Jack’s favorite haunts.292 Campisi told the FBI that the only times he had contact with Ruby were at various sporting events in Dallas and when one would visit the other’s club.293 However, there is some evidence that Campisi was closer to Ruby than he indicated. Campisi told the HSCA in 1978 that Ruby also came to his home once but did not stay for long.294 He also acknowledged visiting Ruby at the county jail on November 29, 1963, for ten minutes after the sheriff’s office contacted him to advise that he was one of several people Ruby wanted to have visit him.295 Indeed, Ruby’s roommate, George Senator, told the FBI that Campisi was one of Ruby’s three closest friends.296
In book after book by conspiracy theorists, Campisi turns up as an alleged “Dallas Mafia figure” with whom Ruby had close ties.297 But the HSCA thoroughly investigated Campisi and found that although his “technical characterization in federal law enforcement records as an organized crime member has ranged from definite to suspected to negative,” the only thing that was clear was that “he was an associate or friend of many Dallas-based organized crime members,” including Joe Civello. However, the HSCA went on to say there was “no indication” that Campisi himself “had engaged in any specific organized crime–related activities.” Yes, Campisi had mob friends. So did Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Although Campisi had been linked with gambling and bookmaking activities, he was never arrested for them, and the sense of the FBI is that he limited his gambling because he feared it would jeopardize the success of his Egyptian Lounge. Like Ruby, Campisi had just as many contacts with members of the Dallas Police Department as he did with those on the seamier side of society, but unlike Ruby, he also had close and friendly contacts with “both state judges and members of the Dallas County District Attorney’s office.”298 And former Dallas sheriff Jim Bowles told me, “I had pizza with Joe many times at his restaurant,” recalling his days when he was the sheriff.299
Another mobster with whom Ruby has been allegedly linked is the aforementioned Joe Civello. Civello, to be sure, was a Mafia figure and the head of the mob, or what there was of it, in Dallas. We know that because he attended the famous Mafia conference of mob leaders from around the country in Apalachin, New York, in 1957.300 But the Mafia had a very small presence in Dallas, and indeed, the FBI concluded there was “no evidence of illegal activity by Joseph Francis Civello,” indicating he was just an associate of leading mob figures who broke bread with them but didn’t participate in their crimes. If he did, they never appeared on the FBI radar screen.301 Civello was convicted on a narcotics charge in 1937, and when he later applied for a pardon, guess who was one of his character witnesses? The sheriff of Dallas County, Bill Decker.302*
Conspiracy theorists, desperate to connect Ruby to Civello and the Mafia, have been reduced to pointing out that among the many papers found in Ruby’s car after his arrest for killing Oswald was a November 18, 1963, Wall Street Journal article on the “Mafia and Business,” in which Civello, among many other mob figures, was briefly mentioned. Some connection. However, Civello did acknowledge to the FBI in a 1964 interview that he had been a casual acquaintance of Ruby’s (as was half of Dallas) “for about ten years,” and had seen Ruby “four or five times during that period.”303
Talking about both Civello and Campisi, former Dallas assistant district attorney Bill Alexander said that around the time of the assassination, “we had no organized crime in Dallas. Our local criminals were too tough for them. I would be the one to have known because I screened all the cases that came through the district attorney’s office. Carlos Marcello had no influence here, and as far as two of our locals, Joe Civello and Joe Campisi, they never did anything here. Campisi owned the Egyptian Lounge, an Italian restaurant, which still has the best spaghetti and meatballs. Joe thought it would add a little flavor, a little romance, to his place if he let on like he was Mafia-connected.”304
Another alleged mob associate of Ruby’s was convicted in 1947 of attempting to bribe the Dallas County sheriff, Steve Guthrie, as part of the Chicago mob’s attempt to move into Dallas by establishing a nightclub as a front for illegal gambling. Since Ruby, from Chicago, permanently moved to Dallas in 1947, the thought has persisted for years that the Chicago mob had sent him to Dallas to be the front man for its gambling club. The alleged Ruby associate was Paul Roland Jones,† whom Jack’s sister Eva had met in Dallas in 1947. Later, and while free on bail pending his appeal on the bribery conviction, Jones had a chance meeting with Ruby in the lobby of a hotel in Chicago. He said members of the Chicago Syndicate who were with him recognized Ruby and told him Ruby was “okay.” Ruby told Jones he planned to return to Dallas to help his sister in business there. It was only after Jones served the five years for his bribery conviction that he returned to Dallas and got to know Ruby fairly well by visiting Ruby’s club.305 Although Sheriff Guthrie stated that Jack Ruby’s name came up on numerous occasions in discussions with Jones during a sting operation in November and December of 1946 at Guthrie’s house after it was wired, a subsequent review by the FBI of the twenty-two tape recordings showed that “at no time on any of the 22 recordings was the name of ‘Jack L. Ruby’ or ‘Ruby’ mentioned.”306 Indeed, Jones, on tape, can be heard telling Guthrie that the front man brought in from Chicago looked like “a preacher” and was “not a Dago, not a Jew.”
The chief of police in Dallas at the time the recordings were made was Carl Hansson. When questioned by the FBI in 1964, the former chief did not recall the name of Jack Ruby ever being mentioned. Furthermore, Hansson noted that he did not have a good opinion of Steve Guthrie and would not place any confidence in any statement by Guthrie to the effect that Paul Roland Jones had mentioned the name of Jack Ruby on the tapes. And Jones himself said he did not mention Ruby’s name and, in fact, had never even heard of the name Jack Ruby at that point in time. Lieutenant George Butler of the Dallas Police Department, who was part of the sting operation with Guthrie, and tape-recorded the meetings with Guthrie and Jones he participated in, investigated the whole case and said Ruby was not involved in the bribery attempt.307
Author Anthony Summers asserts that “Ruby said” his eventual move to Dallas had been “on mob instructions.”308 But Anthony, Ruby could only have said this in one of your dreams, and you would have been better off citing a dream of yours as your source than giving no citation at all.309
Of all the evidence the conspiracy theorists cite to connect not just Ruby with the mob, but Ruby and the mob with JFK’s assassination, none has been cited or relied on more than Ruby’s teleph
one contact with mob figures in the two months preceding the assassination. And, indeed, Ruby did dramatically increase his contact with mob figures he had known from his Chicago days during this period. Conspiracy author David Scheim writes that “these timely and intensive contacts of Ruby suggest that a mob conspiracy [to murder Kennedy] was in progress.”310 “[Ruby’s] calls” to the underworld before the assassination, says conspiracy author John Davis, “suggest some sort of conspiracy.”311 But an analysis of these calls and their purpose by the Warren Commission and HSCA clearly reveals that this most promising of conspiratorial trees bore no fruit for the theorists. All of the calls related to Ruby seeking help in getting the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA) to enforce its rules against two competitors of his, Abe and Barney Weinstein.*
Ruby, having struggled throughout his life to keep his head above water, and having failed in previous nightclub ventures, was determined that this would not happen to his beloved Carousel. But Abe Weinstein, who ran Abe’s Colony Club next door to the Carousel on Commerce Street, and his brother, Barney, who ran the Theatre Lounge around the corner on Jackson, started to seriously hurt Ruby in the summer and fall of 1963 by violating AGVA’s ban on “striptease contests” and performances by “amateurs.”312 As conspiracy author Seth Kantor put it, “The clumsy, sometimes overly enthusiastic amateur strippers were drawing a lot of customers and, what was worse, the Weinsteins were getting by with entertainers they didn’t have to pay for.”313 “Ruby,” the Warren Commission concluded, “apparently believed his two competitors, the Weinstein brothers, were scheduling amateur shows in a manner calculated to destroy his business.”314 Jack himself used to have amateur nights, but when AGVA notified all the club owners in February of 1963 to stop, he immediately complied and his competitors did not.315 And right up to within days of the assassination, Ruby was pleading everywhere for help in stopping the Weinsteins.316
When Ruby’s personal appeals asking AGVA to force the Weinsteins to cease and desist failed, he reached out, wherever he could, to people he felt might get AGVA to do its job. And when one thinks of putting pressure on unions during this period, one automatically thinks of organized crime, which either had infiltrated or had influence over many unions throughout the country. So Ruby, with his union roots in Chicago, naturally reached out, among others, to mob figures. He told the Warren Commission, “I knew persons of notorious backgrounds years ago in Chicago, and I left the union when I found out the notorious organization [mob] had moved in there.” He went on to speak of the “unfair competition” he had been facing in Dallas that “had been running certain shows that we [in the business] were [prohibited] to run by regulation of the union, but they [Weinsteins] violated all the rules of the union, and I didn’t violate it, and consequently I was becoming insolvent because of it…Every person I called, and sometimes you may not even know a person intimately, you sort of tell them, well, you are stranded down here and you want some help—if they know of any official of the American Guild of Variety Artists to help me. Because my competitors were putting me out of business. I even flew to New York to see Joe Glazer [who headed up a large theatrical agency], and he called Bobby Faye, the national president [actually the administrative secretary of AGVA, but “the true head of AGVA in 1963” per the HSCA]. That didn’t help.” Ruby said that “all” of his calls in October and November “were related” to getting people to “help me with the American Guild of Variety Artists…That is the only reason I made those calls.” None, he said, were “in anyway [related] to the underworld.”317
The Warren Commission and FBI did not do as complete a job as they should have in investigating all of Ruby’s phone calls, made from his home and the Carousel Club. But the investigation they did caused them to conclude that all his calls were related to AGVA and the Weinsteins.318 And Ruby’s sister Eva testified that she was very familiar with her brother’s problem with the Weinsteins and knew “he had contacted people all over the country trying to find out who knew the bigwigs in the union [AGVA]” who could help him.319 Ruby even called his brother Hyman in Chicago. “He wanted me to contact some people in Chicago who had connections with AGVA in New York,” Hyman recalled, and he made some calls for his brother.320 Even Larry Crafard, the drifter who worked at the Carousel, recalled that Ruby “was doing his best to get the union to force them [the Weinsteins] to stop.”321
If the Warren Commission and FBI didn’t do quite as thorough a job as they should have investigating Ruby’s telephone calls, certainly the HSCA did, conducting an extensive computer analysis of all his telephone toll records during the period in question. And although the HSCA’s chief counsel, G. Robert Blakey, eventually became very partial to the notion that organized crime was behind Kennedy’s death, the committee, after this analysis, was compelled to conclude “that the evidence surrounding the calls was generally consistent—at least as to the time of their occurrences—with the explanation that they were for the purpose of seeking assistance in [Ruby’s] labor dispute.”322
However, the HSCA said it was “not satisfied” with the explanations given for the calls to three of the mob figures Ruby contacted. One was Irwin Weiner, a Chicago bondsman well known as a financial front man for organized crime and the insurance broker and bondsman for Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union, whom Ruby called, records showed, for twelve minutes on October 26, 1963. The FBI, aware of the call, sought to question Weiner about it on November 27, 1963, but he declined to cooperate. The reason he later gave is that when the FBI called his home after Ruby killed Oswald, he was in Florida, and the agent told his daughter that he wanted to talk to her father about the assassination of the president. “She was shaking with fright,” Weiner later testified before the HSCA, and “because of the way they mistreated my daughter,” he refused to talk to them.323 Although Weiner later told a reporter that Ruby’s call had nothing to do with Ruby’s labor problems (though not saying what the nature of the call was), he told the HSCA that he might have told any reporter who called him anything, since he was not under oath and always lied to reporters.324
In Weiner’s testimony before the HSCA, he said he may have met Ruby “four or five times in my life,” mostly in the 1930s as a result of his going to school with Ruby’s brother Earl, a friend of Weiner’s, and didn’t remember anything about these brief occasions, and “never had anything to do with Jack Ruby at any time in my life.” He assumed that Ruby called him in October because of his earlier relationship with Earl.*
Weiner told the HSCA, “Jack Ruby called me. Evidently he had a nightclub in Dallas, Texas.” He said that Ruby said that “one night a week he had an amateur striptease. Some union that was affiliated with entertainers had stopped him…because the amateur entertainers were not members of the union. He stopped and another competitor of his opened up.” Some lawyer had told Ruby, Weiner recalls, to get an injunction against his competitor, but he would need a bond to do this. Ruby “wanted to know if I would write a bond…I told him no…That was the extent of our conversation.”325
The notion that Weiner, a mob bail bondsman, was involved with Ruby in the assassination of Kennedy is so far-fetched that, as indicated, when Weiner declined to talk to the FBI, the FBI never made any further effort to contact or interview him.326 But wait. Maybe Ruby wanted to know if, after he killed Oswald for the mob (or was Oswald’s handler in Oswald’s killing of Kennedy), the mob would be kind enough to help him post bond for his release on bail pending trial. I say we look into the Weiner matter further.
Another telephone contact that troubled the committee was with Robert “Barney” Baker, a top aide to teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, an avowed enemy of the Kennedys, particularly JFK’s brother Bobby, who, as the attorney general, eventually succeeded in putting Hoffa behind bars. This history naturally was alarming to the HSCA, but there is little else about Ruby’s two conversations with Baker to arouse suspicion. Baker, who had a background in settling labor disputes,327 was someone whom Ruby would likely call. Bake
r told the FBI in 1964 that Ruby called him in November of 1963 (telephone records show it was November 7, 1963) at his home in Chicago. He wasn’t in but returned the call, collect, to Ruby that day, after his wife advised him of it. Ruby, who Baker said was a complete stranger, told him, “You don’t know me but we have mutual friends,” whom he did not name. Ruby proceeded to tell him of his dispute with his competitors, who were “attempting to knock me out,” and that the “mutual friends” had said Baker was good at handling matters such as this, and then asked Baker if he would contact AGVA in New York for him. Baker declined, having been released in June from a federal penitentiary in Minnesota after serving time for violating the Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley), with a condition of his parole being that he not engage in labor dispute matters for five years. Because Baker indicated he had no further contact with Ruby, whereas the HSCA claimed the records showed Ruby called him the next day (November 8) too, the committee said it was “hard to believe that Baker…could have forgotten it.”328 But it is the discussion itself that one is likely to remember, fifteen years later, not whether it required one phone call or two. In the absence of anything else, and the HSCA had absolutely nothing else, this is much to-do about nothing.*
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